After adjusting water do cations and anions need to equal?

Is that one of the goals when adjusting the profile of your water? I have been experimenting with Bru n water and when I make adjustments to the profile those numbers seen to drift apart quite a bit. Want to know if that's okay.

 

There is nothing you can do by adding chemicals to balanced water to unbalance the charges. If a spreadsheet indicates an imbalance after adding something then it is not accounting for charge correctly. This is, I believe, often because most of the spreadsheets do not account for pH shift effects properly. Does the spreadsheet ask for source and target water pH or calculate target water pH after salt/acid/base additions?

Are the imbalances small? If so don't worry about it. The most important thing to understand is that the imbalance is not a consequence of anything you have done wrong.

 

Yes, since we may be adding anions such as dihydrogenphosphate or lactate to the water when adding an acid, those totals are not included in the anion sum in Bru'n Water. However, the water is not 'imbalanced'. It's just that the cation and anion totals have not been totaled correctly. It is not a big deal.

 

I give it the source water ph, the target ph desired, and it calculates the mash ph.
It's when I add acid to reduce the alkalinity that the imbalance comes into play. As an example my cations and anions are 10.7/10.8, if I do a phosphoric edition of 1 mL/gal the cations, anions are 10.7/6.0.
My water has high alkalinity 471 ppm, even if I reduce the water with distilled water to 50%, cations, anions are 5.3/5.4. If I add .63 mL/gal phosphoric acid they end up at 5.3/2.4.
so I'm guessing that is okay just want to be sure. My first time messing with the water.

 

Okay cool, was just wondering if I was missing something.
Great spreadsheet thank you.

 

And it certainly wouldn't be a big deal to include the additions to the total since it is trivial to do so. If an acid is added the change to anion and cation count is 0 because, in the cases of acid, the mix pH is exactly the pH which causes the charge gain by whatever anions are in the original water to exactly equal the charge loss by the added acid's anions. As the anion change is 0 the cation gain/loss must also be 0 since the acid, original water and mix are all neutral.

When a salt is put in a cation is added and as everything (salt, original water and mix) are all neutral the change in the anion concentration must be exactly the same magnitude as the change in cation level. For example,if you add a millimole of monobasic calcium phosphate that amounts to 2 mEq of calcium and 2 mEq anion. Though the anion may be distributed over the mono, di and tribasic forms their total charge will still be 2 mEq.

The same is true of the bases we use such as calcium hydroxide. If we add a millimole of calcium hydroxide then the anion concentration goes up by 2 mEq and the accompanying hydroxide abosorbs 2 mEq of protons thus shifting the pH to the point where the anionic charge of other anions in the mix is decreased by 2 mEq.